breaking news this hour on r t cyprus you along with international lenders agreed to a controversial tax on bank deposits which could see some customers lose up to twenty percent of the savings. also this morning russian tycoon an outspoken kremlin critic boris berezovsky in london age sixty seven with some reports saying he committed suicide. and thousands in damascus attend the funeral of a problem in sunny preacha killed in a suicide attack on a packed moscow that also claimed the lives of forty eight others. good morning it's kevin i would hear it r.t.

this morning just after one am now on our top story than cyprus and international lenders have managed to strike a long awaited agreement on banking on taxing bank deposits of over one hundred thousand euros held in the country's biggest bank that was the agreement customers who keep large sums of money in other banks too will also be forced to sacrifice part of their savings but not so much the country's ailing economy. has got the latest details. well we have now was in agree with forty one percent toxic for the positive above one hundred thousand euros in the bank of cyprus that's the country's biggest lender and four percent on the positive about two thousand in other banks so this has been an important information piece of information about people here have been waiting for and this is a good part of that package the cyprus is trying to put together before that sunday meeting in brussels where they will present the entirety of it to deploy the hope to get approval for what they have so far aside from the levy that they have is the bad controls that will be imposed on controlling the amount of money flowing in and

out of of that the country the country's banks as well as the amount of money people can access and also be have that when they want to pull together a certain amount of money that they have to put up with order to get the tender billion euro be allowed again from the boycott so that's the latest for now cyprus still knows that the a clock is ticking it still has it still has to get that approval and if not that's where it's feature is into the process people have been feeling we have to remember that they have come out into the streets precisely because of this a possible attacks on their deposits and also because of all this uncertainty believe we are not sure if they're going to still have a substantial amount of savings they don't know when they will have access to their cash remember the banks are still closed they're not why do they want to as much cash as they could they're worried for their job so they've been coming out to the streets today we know there have been protests as if people are really feeling frustrated and still even if as a details trickling through with the latest updates they're not completely satisfied they really want to know where this is all headed and when everything

will be settled down for them. so russian tycoon and crimean critic. died in london age sixty seven news of his death was broken in a post on a social media web page a party by son in law. in london with the latest. police haven't confirmed the name yet that they have said that they've launched an investigation into the death of a sixty seven year old man and that that death is being treated as unexplained now is spoken to ten study police and they told me that they usually have to wait for the formal i.d. before they can confirm the name but that confirmation is expected at some point later on today and i also asked them about the speculation around the body having been found in the bar a lot of people reporting that they didn't confirm or deny it but they did tell me that that information didn't come from then of course a huge amount of state surrounding this death of boris berezovsky the exiled

russian taking you know larger than life character there's been talk of health problems of the speculation about suicide as he said there is a huge amount of speculation at this time surrounding the death but right now the circumstances of the death the remain unclear he made his fourteen after the breakup of the city union and then we saw him have self-imposed exile and he sort of side in in in britain in two thousand now in the last couple of years he's housen a very high profile court cases a month which is the spectacular falling out he had with fellow russian oligarch roman abramovich now that call cases very interesting to listen to the reports from people who were there in the courthouse when boris berezovsky was told that he had lost that case against roman abramovich and of the shock that he had so certainly that was a massive blow to boris berezovsky it seems both personally but also financially as

well of course and it does seem that the fall and on somewhat harder times over the last couple of years with these court cases now the russian president's press attash a press corps of has said that the president was sent. letter by boris berezovsky in which he asked to think given this and see which. say that is certainly an interesting twist on that but as we said it's been a tough few years and it does seem that there have been a lot of financial problems but of course this is all speculation what we do know right now is that the thames valley police have launched that investigation they cordoned off the area around his home while that investigation is ongoing no confirmation of the name yet so first was a bit earlier on i also spoke to political analyst from russia's commerce sun newspaper he told me there is also he will go down in russian history as one of the main political figures of the one nine hundred ninety s. but he represents a long gone era in the country probably missed the bit is also he wanted to try to

make a deal with putin thinking that he can do it in the way it was done in the time of year it's in the ninety's when just politics was through such behind the scenes deals on official understanding between only god and probably additions but anyway it seems that it didn't work because we cannot see in it is also common to russia. in recent weeks he was one of the most bright and controversial figures in russian history i think that's the name of is a trade marker for russian politics off ninety's around we had official power of president and prime minister and we had unofficial power off. and bankers have a problem in russia who are very articulate in president to get since euro and are actually running things in russia but this time likely has gone for a serious story coming from the newspapers join john boehner now is publisher of

the website piers how russia dot com a news portal focusing on russia more insight hi there and what do you know about the circumstances of his death if you glean any more information that we can bring our viewers so far. no i think we've all got to keep an open mind until the police report finally. says how he's he died. and so on and that should come fairly quickly i don't think we'll have to wait for an inquest on it or you personally met boris berezovsky what kind of impression that he may leave with you boris berezovsky was an exceptionally charming man you know he would charm the hind legs of a donkey he was very well spoken very good command of the english language. you know he each and everybody he met

a tough side to the. story but he had a tough side too as well i guess oh absolutely he's not somebody you would want to cross when he was it is a day in moscow. there are various reports going on tonight as you say john it is still early days the police are treating his death as unexplained so far but there are some thoughts that he could have been driven to suicide by the recent circumstances of his last days where he capable of suicide you think it was difficult one for you to answer but to think is a man that was it true that it's a difficult one. i mean he. obviously he lost his partner of the last twenty years who had borne him to check the drain and had stood by him and sat by his side during most of the court hearings in the abramovich that you ation in the hike but then she turned to the same court

a few weeks some consolation. suing him over a property in france. and wanted eight million another eight million from him so so to huge blows in his latin ears. you know and since he moved to the u.k. in two thousand and was given asylum here in two thousand and three his sources of income not that i could discern seemed to disappear so he was living on is accumulated savings which were substantially more severe and they were happy but was he close to bankruptcy do you think towards the end i think that was a possibility that. must have featured any initial thoughts i mean he owed fifty six million dollars and he's trying to recoup that he sold a painting of andy warhol store. and i mean you know one hundred thirty three

thousand pounds and that's not going to make a big dent. multi-million pound your door but again you met the man within hours of his death the night dimitri peskov president putin's press press attache said the kremlin had received a letter from him two months ago asking for forgiveness asking to return back to russia why do you think it write that letter after in such a strong critic a staunch critic of putin or vision is well i think. what can i say. there is nothing that you could put past boris berezovsky nothing and. he had a deep love for russia and longed to go back there as i understand so a genuine apology do you think it would have been from a man it could have been but it could have been it would have been forced on him by his own circumstances i mean it's been an open secret in london for at

least a year a year and a half two years now be even before the abramovich law case that boris berezovsky was running out of money and. his last throw of the dice seemed to be a gamble. for joy understand he had expected to get a set a generous settlement from mr abramovich rather than take it all the way through court where he was humiliated by a characterize asian by the judge. that he was inherently dishonest and and so on what's his legacy here in russia we heard circus trucker from commissar newspaper say he was a man from a past area will of course he was because he's not living in an era of the ninety ninety's or do you think is biggest legacy is going to be biggest legacy is probably going to be in the history books as the manipulator of the only

guards who got together and backed boris yeltsin's reelection campaign as president in one thousand nine hundred six thank you very much john for being on the program john boehner the publisher of the a website pearsall russia dot com news for ttle portal focusing on russia appreciated. thank you all the way. the u.s. officials continue to downplay the scale of a mass hunger strike. in a bit more depth plus two. details of. the british.

market. really happening to the global economy with. headlines kaiser reports. mission to teach.

thousands of syrians a. cleric killed by a suicide bomber in damascus say. he was also a high profile supporter of the embattled president bashar al assad. told us any muslim scholar who goes against the rebels is now at target. clergyman or let's say going to school those who are not with the opposition were targeted or were killed we can remember the names for example but others were killed because of having an opinion different done position but everybody believed that what happened is unjustified and cannot be explained we have extremist groups systemic seem to group jihad these who are fighting against the government and the mr before he was killed last friday in his last speech he said that we should fight with the syrian army

and you should not fight with with this opposition groups so this raises a lot of controversy and controversy and discussion in the syrian society and this lead into this killing and we have mr kind of. the permanent assume the. spoiler who lives in he said beforehand that all people who are with the vision in even muslim schools should be killed if they are supporting the government says the syrian government so this is the context of this killing everybody was angry everybody said that he should not be killed he is one of the most famous. leda in syria everybody said that he did not make a crime he did not kill anyone he just give it his opinion if you are making an average looking for freedom he has the freedom to say whatever he wants that's that's what he what everybody says that even so someone in his age he's eighty four years old he's not fighting so we should be should not be killed at all and this is

a crime even people a position of. people support for the government agreed that this should not be done that way at least. syria political activist danny makki spoke to he says the ramifications of the killing could turn the tide now of the two year conflict against the rebels. we have entered a new phase where the free syrian army is losing support after this atrocity which really left many million syrians in mourning without sunni sunni syrians chrystia and i know why. with them all morning long it's a great design i think it was in leading scholar in the mystery and our code so what they start this essentially comes in the notion of the battle between extremism and moderation you can argue that the who is renowned for its academic achievement was a mouthpiece a kind of symbol of what her. kind of vision of them he was a mouthpiece of moderation and he had many enemies most of them shakes in saudi arabia and qatar and there was a major motive for killing him which was the fact that he has it against these

unfair cation and this crisis and he rejected the terrorism which is being which is attacking damascus and aleppo in a database so we could argue that this is a very plain fact it was condemned by the united nations and it was condemned by ki-moon as a terrorist atrocity and even as a worker and in many numerous areas. voice fungus striking detainees a good time to move a claim that being denied access to their clients the situation is said to be life threatening is more than one hundred inmates have reportedly been starving themselves for a month now u.s. officials have played the allegations however and the scale of the crisis saying that only twenty six detainees are refusing food and while president obama still not kept his promise to close the sense that the military now wants fourteen million dollars to upgrade the facility as opposed to telling him about it when was the turn the who advocates for prisoners he says the inmates of being denied justice in a cage like animals indefinitely. the last time that i saw my clients was between

twenty the twenty fifth of february and the eighth of march i visited with them multiple times i was shocked at the condition that they're in in fact we were the first people that broke the story that the hunger strike could be again february of the sixth or seventh around that time frame and it continued on my client at that time had lost twenty six pounds and at this point it's official that he has lost almost forty forty pounds one third of his body weight from one hundred forty seven pounds the administration down in guantanamo bay initially denied the report that the hunger strike was occurring they then said it was seven then fourteen then twenty one and then they said that it wasn't the largest hunger strike in history then they came out and said it's twenty four twenty five and today twenty six so the story is getting more and more accurate as we go but we're running out of time after eleven and a half years these men that live in animal cages in america's offshore prison in guantanamo bay they ask for justice they've been there eleven and a half years ninety percent of them have no charges i can tell you having looked at my clients cases they will never get

a trial based upon the evidence that's against them so if their home countries are not willing to intervene to do something i don't see it coming from washington washington seems to take the position that we don't have the time to deal with these hundred sixty six condemned men and our offshore prison this is not about soccer fields or food or anything else this is about justice and freedom this is a bigger concept this is what the united states stands for not more servings of food and not more soccer fields to play on this is a matter of getting these men home or giving them trials and that's the answer. china is stepping up its energy security with the help of russia moscow's agreed to increase oil supplies to beijing by three times the current level along with other multi-billion dollar deals the two powers also want geo political change with the new chinese president saying ties with russia will help bring about a fair world order as they put it our teacher in english has been following xi jinping as first official overseas trip. some of the major points that the chinese

leader has also made of course was about the cooperation between russia and china among other things that the two countries also agree on is the fact that it is about time to leave the old stereotypes declined he said that we're living in the twenty first century and therefore the cold war era is gone and over with and therefore the stereotypes and thinking along those lines also has to go and he also mentioned that russia and china are their cooperation will provide for a fair or world order he also mentioned of course the need to not just to move away from syria types but also to move towards the multiple world and the multiple areas the of the world is also one of the founding principles of bricks of course brics essentially was a trade and economic organization but it is now moving increasing towards becoming a major geo political player and that is going to be one of the main subjects of discussions during an upcoming brick summit in south africa and yet despite of course there are many agreements on the political level of russia and china still

have several things that they need to work on and among those things is the gas supplies deal from russia to china which has been in the works for ten years and it does look like during this visit russia and china have made some headway towards finding a solution but the details of the deal are yet to be figured out and it is expected that those details will come up until the end of the year but of course the chinese leader said that russia and china nevertheless are each other's biggest partner and are this the seeing eye to eye on a lot of issues and cooperation is something that the two countries are going not just to continue but we'll all start he said that his trip there is a symbolic significance by happening in march because the leave their hopes that he will see some very good fruits borne forth from the seeds that he has so on during this visit. are you going to can ever why warning against foreign interference in the affairs of other nations the chinese president's visit to russia has underscored a stance that a counterweight is needed to america's role in global affairs if we amend dels geo

political analyst and author of myths lies and oil wars he says she doing things trip is meant to show that beijing won't be a puppet that sends a signal to the united states to washington who has been very. bristolian and increasingly militarily hostile to chime in the last two years with the egypt of its so-called what russia has to bring to the table is essential for china and that is energy security over by plane land routes nason foiled primarily and at a time when the chinese african oil sources are being increasingly put under pressure from africa in sudan and libya and elsewhere for russia it also needs the extreme really important orientations of what president putin calls the new eurasian with the. direction of the russian economy if russia and china what it adds against each

other and then the game is over and you have no contender to sole superpower germany from washington i think that's a very unhealthy state of the world both for the for china for russia for the rest of the world but also for the united states that too much power concentrated in too few hands is always a danger to world peace if you called it earlier on it's an event that united millions around the world earth hour is still going by the way also saw moscow turn the lights off in the kremlin for the very first time the lights back on in the russian capital i spoke to it in a collection of about this fascinating of it. it was really a spectacular view and for so many here in russia and i'm sure worldwide it was a very inspiring and a very uniting moment not only for those on the ground but in space as well as russian cosman out among them i knew he supported that movement and he actually filmed a video but he did that in space and i guess we can now listen to a bit of it. you can see clearly just how much our planet needs care and protection

when i first came on board the international space station i was amazed by the beauty of the earth it's the most important thing we've got it's. completely it depends on us on how we treat it support the earth will work and we'll be watching our peer how the earth finally gets its hour of rest well it is a symbolic movement really it was made to attract more attention towards the problem of the climate change to raise people's awareness of you know carbon pollution and other environmental needs and it. right actually it started as a very local events in sydney in australia back in two thousand and seven with just a somewhere around two million people only in australia taking part in that but then it's just very quickly growing to massive global events and just for the record back in two thousand and twelve i guess more than one hundred and fifty countries took part in that contains.

take you around the world for some top world news stories now at one twenty five moscow time clashes have been reported in lebanon after the country's president accepted the resignation of his prime minister najib mikati along with his whole government step out of a dispute with the shia group has the country's been locked in political stalemate of since has been blocked the creation of a supervisory body to oversee the next part of introduction is fear the move could further destabilize lebanon which is finding it increasingly difficult to prevent the syrian civil war from spilling over the border. mass protests a shake of the capital of bahrain where thousands of demonstrators are demanding the release of prominent human rights activist now bill roger this is the latest outbreak of popular dissent against the ruling want to keep calling for political reform in the oil rich kingdom the protest movement see there too eighty people killed and scores arrested since it erupted in february twentieth eleven. rounds is confirmed the senior al qaeda military commanders been killed in fighting in mali

was killed as part of a military offensive in the mountainous area in the country's north last month earlier parasail the ongoing campaign against the islamist insurgency saying it entered its final stage. programs continue coming up next kaiser unveils the dirty deeds of the world's financial power players he's got yet more on them so after the break is next. jorge rios an argentinean student at seventeen other similar students from foreign countries all paid a private company between three thousand and four thousand dollars so that they get to take part in a u.s. state department work study program he was promised forty hours of work per week at

a common fair. food restaurant with a decent salary but the reality he claims was quite different he was actually only given around four hours of work per week what was expected to be on call twenty four seven like a surgeon i guess in case of some burger emergency he says he was forced to live in accommodations that were provided by the restaurant real six plane that he had to sleep in a child sized bunk bed in a basement with seven other people in filthy conditions and for this service he had to pay the restaurant three hundred dollars a month overall real swallowed up paying the burger joint to work for them what a way to not make a living though this story sounds funny on the surface many foreigners in work and study and work in travel programs do experience exploitation upon arrival in the usa i've even personally met some of them so i know but more than that in a time when millions of americans are struggling to put food on the kitchen table why are companies searching for thousands of exploitable foreigners to work for two

dollars an hour cheaper it is corporate greed and their absolute disrespect for americans that allows this to happen just pay the extra two dollars and have americans work for you to cheap corporate pigs but that's just my opinion. well. it's technology innovation all the developments around russia we are going to the future are covered. max kaiser this is the kaiser report what you got for me today sweetie pie max kaiser well i have command and control confiscation and crystal.

the first headline is actually this is a newsletter sent to people in a housing association in manchester is from eastland homes can you really afford sky cigarettes bingo drinks and other nonessentials they live in an open air prison these are states and the government if they're not wanting to supply the prisoners with what little comfort they have in cigarettes and methamphetamine in baps also inhalation then they should consider closing these prisons getting rid of something completely wasteful like the monarchy and returning to some kind of genuine economy well but the point is that once you become a ward of the state this is what is essentially happens especially during a crisis situation now my question is why as wards of the state why aren't the city of london why are they receiving newsletters like this why don't we write insulting condescending man he like.